Cow Abuse Video Highlights the Dangers of Factory Farms

Only
in Wisconsin would the sordid Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal be re-enacted
with cows in the role of the victims of abuse.

Remember
when California dairy farmers launched a series of television commercials
claiming their cows were happier than ours? Now we know it wasn’t just because
cows like lying around on beaches and surfing.

Just
as a series of leaked photographs exposed CIA and Army personnel torturing and
sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners, a horrendous video by Mercy for Animals,
an animal rights group, spread far and wide on the Internet prompted public
outrage.

The
video, shot by one of the group’s members working undercover on the Wiese
Brothers Farm in Brown County, showed workers shouting profanities as they
viciously beat, whipped, kicked and stabbed injured cows, dragged cows with
ropes and chains and dangled bleeding cows in the air with heavy machinery.

It
was a public relations nightmare for any company associated with the farm that
might want to market its products to decent, feeling members of the public.

That’s
why Nestle, owners of DiGiorno, the nation’s top-selling frozen pizza,
immediately stopped using Wiese Brothers as a supplier of the milk to make its
cheese.

A
couple of employees were fired and there’s a remote possibility of legal
charges being filed, but don’t hold your breath.

That’s
because the second priority of the state’s dairy industry, after publicly
expressing how shocked and appalled it was by the disturbing video so many had
seen, was to try to convince people they hadn’t really seen what they’d seen.

What
looks like inexcusably cruel cow abuse, several dairy farmers explained,
actually could have been benevolent attempts to immediately get downed cows
back on their feet.

That’s
because dairy farmers have to try anything possible to quickly get a
1,500-pound cow back up or the muscles in its legs will turn to mush and it
will have to be destroyed.

Besides,
they added, Mercy for Animals is some kind of wacko group that promotes
veganism. It was just trying to make dairy farmers look bad for its own
propaganda purposes.

This
incident could be a turning point dramatizing once and for all the difference
between factory farming and the romantic vision most of us still hold of
wholesome, salt-of-the-earth family farming.

Have
you ever wondered why when you drive across Wisconsin these days you don’t see
all that many cows, happy or otherwise? Instead, you see acres of anonymous,
aluminum-sided buildings that look like they could contain all the Napa Auto
Parts anybody would ever need.

When
the Wiese Brothers milk 5,000 cows three times a day, no one bothers giving
those animals names based on their amiable personalities or letting
12-year-olds take them to the Wisconsin State Fair.

It’s
a nearly completely robotized system. In fact, those images of employees
screaming crude names for female body parts at cows while clubbing and kicking
them were rare human moments, albeit ugly ones, in an inhuman process.

The
official name of these large factory farms is a dead giveaway for what makes
these operations so different and so much more dangerous to all the rest of us
than those long-gone happy days down on the farm.

They
are called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). For most factory
farms, the only purpose of the living, breathing animals is to stand side by
side in an enclosed pen consuming high-growth feed and transforming it into
enormous lagoons of liquid waste.

Of
course, in dairy farming, cows perform another important job as well—serving as
perpetual milk machines. You’d think that would earn them a little more respect
from their handlers instead of being unfairly yelled at for being whores.

Now
that farming in Wisconsin has been taken over by corporations instead of
slow-talking, old guys in overalls, and their plump, cheery wives who fry
chicken and bake pies, it’s important that government write some serious
regulations to prevent cow torture and protect the state’s groundwater from
being contaminated by oceans of liquid manure.

But
it may not surprise you to learn that Gov. Scott Walker, who opposes government
regulation of his corporate donors, has cut enforcement of laws affecting
factory farms in half even as the number of CAFOs in the state has leaped from
25 to more than 200.

In
2012, the Department of Natural Resources referred only 33 violations to the
attorney general for prosecution, far below the already low state average of 65
cases a year for the previous decade.

Even
if you don’t really care what happens to cows in this state, you might change your
tune one day in the future when you turn the tap and get a nice, big glass of
liquid manure.

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